When someone you care about is suffering from substance abuse disorder (SUD), your instinct may be to do whatever you can do to help them. However, even with the best of intentions, you can do more harm than good if the help you offer is actually enabling.

Enabling. What does that mean, anyway? It means that even if your intentions are in the right place, when you offer help to your loved one who is struggling with addiction, the help you give inadvertently perpetuates the problem.

1) PRECONTEMPLATION STAGE

“It isn’t that we cannot see the solution. It’s that we cannot see the problem.”

Precontemplators usually show up in therapy because of pressures from others… spouses, employers, parents, and courts… Resist change. When their problem comes up, they change the topic of conversation. They place responsibility for their problems on factors such as genetic makeup, addition, family, society, destiny, the police, etc. They feel the situation is HOPELESS.

Here’s the good news: I am kinder and gentler after two-plus years of recovery. The bad news? I was pretty awful in the early days of my sobriety: angry at the world and resentful of the pickle I had gotten myself into. On top of that, I’ve written it all down in a daily blog (posted on the worldwide web), so I can’t even pretend I was the ideal sober newbie.

For a host of reasons I got fed up with the whole mess and stopped drinking July 28, 2013. But I was bored, I resented my situation and I developed more than a little anger for those who could sip a cocktail without polishing off everyone else’s drink leavings and the dregs in the bottle.